Test Card Tribute

Seems to be working ok for me. All this talk of technical hitches got me thinking about the days when the BBC used to play the National Anthem and close down at 2am. Imagine that now- all those precious hours of porn and phone-in con man game shows wasted...

When I was really young I used to wake up stupidly early at weekends to catch kid's telly. Sometimes I'd get up a little too early while it was still dark and pissed guys were still stumbling home. But hark, here's paddington bear. Shit- what's he doing with that cucumber and what exactly is his duffel coat hanging off??! Scary times for the unfortunate child who got up before the adult cartoons had finished....

Then came the test card. Whatever happened to chalkboard girl I wonder? Some say she succumbed to narcotics like so many child stars and went on to appear on Naked Jungle with Keith Chegwin. Others say she's now a man called Roscoe. No matter she's now up to, we salute her and her harlequin companion for their contribution to entertainment. But why on earth would you play noughts and crosses with a stuffed clown? Maybe the girl was intentionally made bored so that she would empathise with our own boredom.

After that came half an hour of ceefax stock market pages, followed by the most disturbing kid's cartoons. Strange Soviet animations about a bundle of string called Szczupksch or Japanese manga about some kind of gerbil-dolphin hybrid and his badly-dubbed companions. Entertaining but maybe not in the right way.

Four hours in, and the good stuff came. Bert and his Racoon chums, Alvin and the Chipmunks (surely Alvin was a chipmunk too though? Or at least some form of humanoid cross), Potsworth & co, the Ninja Turtles. In fact all the best kids shows seem to involve animals with human attributes. Even the Poddington peas had opposable thumbs...

This was a golden age of kid's tv- before Dick & Dom sodomised it with ad-libbed shite. I reckon I'd rather watch the test card than another episode of "In Da Bungalow". Plus to rub salt into the wound...it was actually a maisonette. Fuckers.